Creative musings in bright colors

Posts tagged ‘EdM’

This manicure was SO straight-forward that…I kinda forgot to take photos of it. 80% of the photos that I have are oddly out of focus and 15% are badly framed. Oops! At least it is a simple one I suppose!

Super simple and super tiny nails today! After the Christmas holidays my nails broke down to tiny nubbins. Which means I was too lazy to do any real nail art on them, and just went ahead and stamped! And for some reason I was in a tone-on-tone mood (I think I wore these at the same time as Monday’s nails). Voila!

So, not the most exciting manicure in the world, but cute enough! Hope you enjoyed. I remain incredibly jet lagged but quite happy (well, not to be back in the hospital, but certainly to be sleeping in my own bed)!

Yes, it is a pun off the name of the polish, yes I am a goofball! Also, today formally begins the series of holiday-appropriate nail art. This one was painted during autumn but is honestly more red/green than orange/green which was the initial intent!

Anyway, this is a very very simple manicure (as many are during things like residency). Just a polish and a stamp. Now, the polish happens to be a multichrome, and the stamp is a holo. Honestly, I didn’t think this color combo would work that well, but Dragon stamps amazingly well (I just need to acknowledge that A England makes polishes that stamp like magic).

Honestly, I was aiming for a completely different manicure when I started this, but my gradient came out all wrong so I ended up with this instead!

I was going for a light orange-orange-red-purple style, and as you can see it is 95% orange an 5% red with no purple at all! I tried. I really did. In retrospect, I should have known it wasn’t going to work since the purple I was trying to use is currently a dried up blobby mess. Live and learn!

I ended up deciding that all gradients (as long as the colors aren’t terrible and need to be flat-out started over) look good with some geometric patterns. I wanted something a bit more delicate so I went with this design, and of course added colors to the dots and diamonds. I think this is the third time I have done this same thing with different colors.

That’s all for today! There is a similar gradient floating around on the blog too, since I was on night float and thus was able to do slightly different nails (and keep this poor blog running)! Hope you enjoy!

I’ve been doing so much stamping (mostly due to lack of time) that I haven’t been using many of my inspiration photos recently! This is another stamping day, but this one comes with inspiration, and is super glittery.

Years ago, I saw this stained glass mani at Emily de Molly and I died inside. I wanted the polish and the stamp and the whole thing. I finally bought the stamping plate, and thanks to the Polish Pickup Pack, I owned the perfect polish. This mani makes me so happy!

What you see here are three thin coats of Playing With Fire, which is a black opal inspired polish by Ever After. It is stunning! Black jelly base loaded with orange, red and a few green color-shifting flakes as well as tiny blue holographic hex glitters and even tinier green microglitter squares. I hope this polish is easier to take off than it looks, because it looks like a glitterbomb, but all the glitter is flakies!

Unfortunately, the polish is no longer available since it was one of the January polish pickup options, but since I’ve been buying 1-3 polishes per month with polish pickup, I have no shortage of incredible new polishes to play with!

This mani ended up boring and almost ugly. I like the base polish a lot but every time I try to come up with some color to use over it, I turn to dark purple-grey or gold! And for some reason most of the designs end up wonky looking.

I don’t know why I picked this stamp (which seems to be a trend this week) but it ended up looking like rungs on a ladder or maybe the straps on a fancy jacket? If fancy jackets came in murky purple tones? I don’t know!

Anyway, leaving all this aside, the 31 Day Challenge starts this weekend! I am not going to be participating every day because I don’t have enough manis backlogged and I certainly don’t have enough time to paint and edit that much, but I am going to keep to posting three times a week and matching my nails of the day to that days prompt! I think there will be a few where I jump a day forward or backwards, but I should have most of them sorted out. I love seeing what everyone puts together for the #31DC2018!

So, this is a bit of a fail. I was sent a water-based base coat/top coat to review from the Born Pretty Store, with the intent to use it as a protective layer for foils. I have one water based top coat, but it is a mess to use and takes a very long time to dry. Needless to say, at least that one works, this one does not!

I started by painting my nails with a faintly holographic silver polish, Diamond by Darling Diva. I then top coated with my standard top coat (Seche Vite) and waited for the nails to dry.

After they were totally dry, I painted them with JNR Star Glue, which is also from the born pretty store and is basically Elmer’s glue in a nail polish bottle. It works great…as does Elmer’s glue. Once the white faded to clear, I threw on some silver vaguely disco-ball-eque foils, which looked amazing. I wish I had taken photos at this stage, since I had two perfect nails (which never happens) and most of the other nails looked pretty darn good!

I then added the Born Pretty water based base coat, and let it dry. Unlike regular top coat, the foils only shrunk and shriveled up a bit, but you could still see the design in the foil. I stamped with Sinful Colors Black on Black using plate EdM 17, and then added another layer of normal top coat. With my usual aqua base, adding regular top coat does not ruin the foil finish. This time, it did. What ever is in Born Pretty’s water base does not protect the underlying foil from being destroyed by regular top coat.

So, in the end, I have a fun silver and black geometric design, but I do not have silver holographic disco ball nails. You can find the water base at the Born Pretty Store for $3.99, but I cannot recommend it since my nails still ended up effectively foil-less!

Something simple, yet rather unique! For this mani I grabbed (yet another, omg) new polish and stamped on it. I wanted something weird looking but somewhat geometric, and luckily I totally own that stamp!

The base here is one of the ILNP holiday collection polishes, called Sparks May Fly. What you see here are three thin coats of this odd-colored polish! It is a carmel-toned brown (a brownish gold) filled with glitter and holographic shards. I don’t own anything else like this, despite owning a lot of dark golds! I honestly don’t love this color against my skin, but I love how odd the color is (dark mustard? I don’t even know how to describe it) and it works well with nail art.

I stamped over Sparks May Fly with this super funky pattern from one of my Emily de Molly plates. I had just grabbed a new bottle of black polish, so it didn’t stamp quite as well as I had hoped (I need to wait for it to thicken up a bit before it will really stamp well) so sorry for the slightly see-through stamp!

Readers, I am sorry about this. I tried so hard to make it pretty for you, and I only partly succeeded! But it wasn’t my fault…

So, I received two magnets (to go with magnetic polish) from the Born Pretty Store to review, and this is the second. It is N03, a star pattern. I have seen other people try and use star patterns online, and usually it doesn’t work well. I was hopefully with this one. When I tested it on my mat it worked well, but I forgot about the curvature of my nails! Ugh. Suffice to say the center of this magnet is useless (as it appears all star magnets are) and the side that works best is still iffy. Compared to the diagonal lines magnet (which I showed almost a month ago), this one is far less useful.

I ended up decided to stamp a floral star pattern over the magnetic art, centering the flower over the “center” of the star. The only finger that REALLY picked up the magnet (aka the one where I have the flattest nail bed) was my middle finger, and there the stamp looks great. Otherwise? Meh.

This is one of my recent favorites! I was going to throw it into a “favorites” week (I have a few on back log) but I ran out of manis on my computer and I needed a last minute edit so here we go!

The design is actually very simple, but the polishes are anything but! A purple multichrome gradient with a gold multichrome, a deep triangle of gold glitter, and then stamping on a black triangle. The black triangle initially looked matte (as most stamped designs do) and I ended up LOVING how that looked so I re-matted the triangle at the end. I tried it completely glossy and it just didn’t have the same pop!

The base color here is yet another new holiday polish that I received from Nail Polish Canada. This one is called Tilted, by ILNP. What you see here are two thin coats of the polish, which shifts from indigo to purple to burgundy to red-gold to green. I posted a photo taken in my living room (hence the really funny lighting!) since I went downstairs to play some mariokart with a friend and the shift was super crazy strong! Under direct light its mostly an indigo and purple with hints of burgundy.

I have a slight problem…I definitely already own too many multichromes and in particular too many that start with purple. I think I might have to part with either this or one of my other three because this many is nuts! Or, I can make the shiftiest dragon egg every, but I would feel quite foolish wasting such a pretty color with polish that doesn’t make your nails fall off :-p

I am a bit surprised at how hard it is to gradient with multichromes. Genius in the Bottle did NOT want to go on in any meaningful way! It is usually a gold-copper-green shifter and all you really see here is the gold. Still cool, but not quite what I was going for.

Hope you enjoyed! I am returning today, so I hope I can throw together a new post by Friday. If not, just know that it is Match day for residency and I might instead be out partying (or hiding away if I don’t get one of my top 5 choices).

In my head, the name of this mani is all Shakespeare-ified (Wing’ed Love) but I figured adding an apostrophe would confuse everyone…and I left it in normal English. Anyway, today starts my Valentine’s manis and I wanted to do something with birds!

Basically, I found this small stamp I had never used (despite owning the plate for years) and wanted to create a mani around it. That is the two doves image on my middle finger. I ended up using birds from 3 different stamping plates and leaves from a fourth. So. Many. Stamps!

This mani also uses the first of the polishes that I won from the Nail Polish Canada holiday nail art challenge! I ended up with 21 new polish (omg) about 2/3 of which I adore and 1/3 of which I would never have picked. This is one of the ones I would not have gone for. This is Once in a Blue Moon by ORLY, and is actually a nice pale blue-grey color, and is a two-coater which is great. However…it is also a frost. Can the nail polish community at large just agree to stop making frosty polishes? There are brush strokes all over the place and I would much rather see this as a shimmer or metallic, or even a creme. Also, I hate the ORLY brushes, they are far too wide for my poor pinky nail! All-in-all, I don’t know that I am going to try very hard to keep this particular color…it might end up going to my sister.

I bought this awesome indigo dress with a lace overlay, so I had to create some matching nails when I wore it to a wedding! I wish I had a photo of the dress ready to go, it was quite pretty 🙂

This is basically just blue and black quasi-lace. I thought lace alone was boring, so I only put that on my accent nails. The other nails got a thick black border and a swirly center. The blue polish I used as a base is one of those semi-metallic polishes that has a lot more depth depending on the angle, so they came out looking cool…but only if you got them in the right light! Otherwise the pattern was almost too subtle.

I had actually forgotten what a pretty color Blue my Mind is…but then I remembered that I hate how wide the Sally Hansen brushes are. Ugh!

This mani came out better than I had hoped, but I made a crucial error…I forgot to check that my nails were even before I started! If you are ever going to paint a scene across your tips, be sure that one of them isn’t crooked (sorry 4th finger, I’m looking at you).

Regardless, this was quite fun! I wanted to do something spooky, and I realized that I had yet to use an EdM stamping plate that I picked up a while ago! Unfortunately, the plate is not etched really deeply, so although the images pick up fine, they are not incredibly dark (to be fair, I used regular polish for this…my black stamping polish finally ran out).

I ended up double stamping some of the trees, the fox, and little bits of grass, which is how I got the grey-and-black difference. I quite like it! I am also glad I went with another EdM polish for the background. 🙂

This mani is both a success and a disappointment…because I absolutely LOVE the base polish, but I had such a hard time picking what I was going to do once the polish was on!

I tried three different stamps with four different color polishes before settling on this design! And it wasn’t even my decision…I got so fed up of things I didn’t like that I shoved my nails in front of my husbands face and demanded to know what matched. He said “silver” so I just went with it!

I think I just default to EdM plate 03 if I don’t want to cover too much of a really pretty polish. It isn’t a terrible idea, but I have so many other plates!

Regardless, what you see here is three thin coats of Illyrian Polish Eleven, with two thick coats of top coat. This polish is a really cool mix of colors and finishes, especially since for me mixing reddish-purple with orange and gold is basically the height of nail polish. So, this polish has a wine-colored jelly base, and is filled with small and medium glitters that shift from red, through orange and gold, and finally to green. It also has a lot off scattered holo glitters which show up in the sunlight. Overall, this polish is amazing…BUT you will need two coats of top coat to smooth out the finish. It isn’t that the glitters stick up, but you will get uneven flatness over the larger glitters (as one does). Worth it!

Ok, now that I am done drooling over this polish, I need to come up with other ways to wear it. Any suggestions? I don’t want to cover it but wearing polish alone is not fun enough! 😀 Also, this is my first Illyrian Polish, and I can safely say that I love their polishes! It went on well and had surprisingly good spread and pigmentation for a jelly with that much glitter!

Raindrops are totally a pattern, right? So droplets must be! I was going to create a nautilus shell, but I didn’t want to spend hours painting each nail…I settled on this and I rather love it.

The design was actually inspired by a previous design of my own, Pond Ripples. Since I obviously still have the same colors, and I recently bought a new copy of the stamping plate I used (that now picks up much MUCH better), I was planning to exactly copy the design…but THEN I tested my teal flakies over a bunch of other polishes and picked a different base!

If nothing else, this mani is insanely glittery. Not in a holographic way, but just…a lot of layers of shimmer. You cannot tell in the photos but when I shift my nails its mesmerizing. I am also glad I bought a new copy of this plate, I really love this stamp!

I actually added matte top coat to one finger just to see if I liked it better (because I have to do that whenever I add flakies) and although it was pretty, I liked the depth of shimmer better with shiny top coat. Shiny it is! Hope you enjoyed 🙂

I was playing around with stamps that I wanted to turn into decals some weeks ago, and decided I really liked how this design looked! I intended to do full-nail designs on my ring and middle fingers, but I ended up cutting out part of the pattern and doing this instead. I like it!

That being said, this design (and color pallet) is a little more…daring…than I usually go for in the hospital. However, I am on the first elective I’ver actually looked forward to, so I hope the neurologists are cool with it!

My only regret is the base color. It is quite pretty (a green-leaning blue with copious pink flecks) but it took five coats. FIVE. And even then you can almost see a nail line. Ugh!

This mani was risky…because I wore it to the hospital! I was tired of not wearing colors, and this untried multichrome was just starting at me. Begging to be used. So use it I did!

The base here is three thin coat sod Undenied by ILNP. Seriously, I NEED to stop buying ILNP multichromes! I think I own a whole rainbow at this point. Undenied is a tiny bit thinner than some of the other multichromes I’ve used, I could have gotten away with two thicker coats but I wanted to make sure there would be no bubbles!

Regardless, the main color is a vibrant purple with red undertones, which shifts through magenta, pink, and orange-gold at sharp angles. Primarily you get the purple, pink, and a hint of reddish-orange. I don’t own any other purple multichromes, I really like this!

Once that was dry (and you know, I took something like 40 photos), I added the nail art. I ended up putting down a bit of a stamp from an EdM plate, and then deciding it didn’t look exiting enough so adding some dots. Which in retrospect I wish I hadn’t…it looked better without them! Oh well.

I really like how this mani came out, but it took forever to plan! I knew I wanted something with white, grey, and pink…and trying to figure out what to use for the stamp vs the background took forever. I think I used all 5 nail demos on my silicone mat! Worth it 😀

The stamping plate I used here was sent for review from the Born Pretty Store, but it is full of fun leaves and flowers…both of which are a pain to free-hand. So, I am really glad this plate works as well as it does! It’ll be VERY useful come fall. The geometric pattern is from an Emily de Molly plate though.

You also cannot tell, but I actually used both a white and a silver to stamp, just to see how the variation looked! It’s most noticeable in the non-sunlight photos.

If you want the floral stamping plate, head over to the Born Pretty store, it is currently on sale for $2.99! Don’t forget to use my code, LY5X31…although I don’t think it can be applied to things already on sale, sorry!